The problem is that libebl depends on loading any backends dynamically
as shared libraries. See libebl/eblopenbackend.c. Without the backends
various functionality just doesn't work. So you'll have to compile in at
least the native/target backend.
There is a hacky version of that on the mjw/RH-DTS git branch. But that
just hard codes the backends (basically limited to those that RHEL
supports). If we make static linking possible we need to clean that up
to make it configurable (it might simply be all vs native, but it should
include at least the native/target backend).